The Gentrified Ghostbusters of 2016

The new “Ghostbusters” is set in a New York that’s become a ghost town in more ways than one.

Photograph by Hopper Stone / SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT

The price of a ticket to the new “Ghostbusters” will buy you not just one happy ending but two. After the paranormal investigators played by Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones, Kate McKinnon, and Kristen Wiig have finished freeing New York from supernatural domination, the grateful mayor offers them unlimited resources to facilitate their future ghostbusting ventures. The women choose—spoiler alert—to use the taxpayer money to rent Hook and Ladder 8, the Tribeca firehouse where their male predecessors set up shop in the original movie. Earlier in the film, before Jones joined the team, McCarthy, McKinnon, and Wiig visited the building with a real-estate agent, scampering around just like the guys did back in 1984, delighted by the Beaux-Arts façade and the open floor plan, until the other shoe dropped: the rent was twenty-one thousand dollars a month, far more than what they could afford. Appalled, they settled for a spot in Chinatown, but the spectre of the unattainable dream house hung over the movie’s proceedings, far more realistic than any of its C.G.I. ghosts. Such is the erotic power of Manhattan real estate that the reunion of heroines and house takes the place of regular romantic wish fulfillment. In 1984, Bill Murray saved the town and got the girl. In 2016, the girls save the town and get prime converted loft space.

The joke about the firehouse is, of course, a joke about gentrification in New York. Can you believe what it costs to live in this city now? The Ghostbusters apparently can’t, which made me begin to doubt their competence to rescue it. Not to pull a Neil deGrasse Tyson and interrupt the fun with some simple fact-checking, but wouldn’t a group of grown-up Manhattan professionals interested in renting south of Fourteenth Street know that Taylor Swift pays forty thousand dollars a month for the West Village town house she’s staying in while she renovates the Tribeca apartment she bought for nineteen million? A StreetEasy search shows two apartments currently for rent in the building one door over on North Moore Street from Hook and Ladder 8, one for $29,500 a month, the other for $32,500. The firehouse may not come with the host of spa-style amenities for humans and their pets promised by the euphemism “luxury rental,” but if your heart is set on a freestanding structure of historical and aesthetic value in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in one of the most expensive cities in the world, it still seems like something of a steal. Have the Ghostbusters honestly not gone apartment hunting since the Koch administration? Which New York have they been living in?

A New York that’s become a ghost town, it turns out, in more ways than one. Spiritually, the director Paul Feig’s version of the city resembles the backdrop to a late-night talk show, full of lights and absent of people. Its sheer human blankness is the one genuinely eerie thing about it. You’d never guess that the city’s public-transportation system is stretched to a breaking point from the looks of the fictional Seward Street subway station, where Jones briefly works as an uncommonly gregarious M.T.A. employee; it’s empty save for a lone graffiti artist, a white dude who shows his work at an upscale gallery (more gentrification humor) and apologizes to Jones as he sprays paint on the tiles in front of her. Equally abandoned are the usually clogged streets of Chinatown, where the gang tests out its lasers and grenades in an alleyway without fear of hitting a soul, and those of Times Square, whose few pedestrians are frozen in orderly rows during the film’s climactic showdown. When Slimer, the slovenly green pus ball of a ghost who takes the form of a triple chin with arms, at last makes an appearance, stuffing a dozen street-cart hot dogs down his gullet, you want to kiss him right on his greasy mouth for having some kind of personality.

These complaints wouldn’t much matter if the original “Ghostbusters” hadn’t been such a quintessential New York movie, one that drew its energy and inspiration from the functional chaos of the city’s ordinary life. New York, in 1984, had a crack problem and a crime problem, not to mention the usual rats, roaches, garbage, and corruption. Why shouldn’t it have a ghost problem, too? For most of the movie, the Ghostbusters are treated by their fellow-citizens like novelty exterminators. The pests they’re dealing with may be supernatural, but they’re pests nonetheless, and someone’s got to get rid of them. When the guys suit up to head to 55 Central Park West, the art-deco apartment building chosen as an operating base by Gozer, the Sumerian god of destruction, the public finally understands the stakes and turns out in numbers to watch the show. Nuns, Hasids, punks, Rastas, preps, and everyone else either too distinct or too nondescript to fit any particular label squeeze together behind a police barricade as if expecting the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. If the apocalypse is going to happen, they should at least have a good view.

“Only in New York” is a classic motif, as old as the city, and it’s what the original “Ghostbusters” is all about. “I love this town!” Ernie Hudson’s Winston Zeddemore shouts, victorious, after Gozer, in the form of a massive, malevolent Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, has been blown to bits. Watching the movie thirty years later, though, a jarring note of tragedy, surely unintended, creeps in. By the time “Ghostbusters” was released, the AIDS epidemic was already three years old. New York was fast becoming a city haunted by real ghosts. Lives ended; lives were destroyed. Other lives carried on as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening. At one point in the 1984 film, a businessman gets into a cab, oblivious to the fact that it’s being driven by a rotting corpse. You can be sure that the director, Ivan Reitman, didn’t mean that image as a metaphor for the times, but it ended up serving as one anyway.

New York today is becoming a different kind of ghost town. Stretches of Manhattan lie fallow, empty town houses and apartments bought up as investments by foreign billionaires who avoid the taxes by staying away. Apartment prices keep going up; legislation on affordable housing stalls; people are pushed out of their homes and out of sight. To rent an apartment without wondering who the previous tenants were, or to move to a neighborhood without wondering who your neighbors are now, is an act of moral stupidity. Yet Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters don’t need to wonder; they don’t seem to have neighbors at all. Certainly no Chinese people live in their Chinatown, not even the delivery guy for their favorite Chinese restaurant. He’s played by Karan Soni, who is, not incidentally, the only notable person of color aside from Jones to appear in the movie until Ernie Hudson shows up in a cameo as her uncle just before the credits roll.

“I don’t know if that was a race thing or a lady thing, but I’m mad as hell,” Jones says, after she’s dropped while trying to crowd-surf at an all-male, all-white heavy-metal concert. The line would be funnier if the show’s audience didn’t perfectly reflect Feig’s New York itself, white essentially down to its last extra. It’s a false, grotesquely homogenized vision of the city, as aggressively bland and incurious a commercial representation of the streets of New York as I can recall. Even as Feig plays gentrification for laughs, his movie slickly embodies what the writer Sarah Schulman has called “gentrification mentality,” the desire to replace the city’s “complex realities with simple ones.” Feig shot “Ghostbusters” mainly in a hangar outside Boston, relying heavily on green screens. He could have shown us any part of New York he wanted, and settled on a vacant Times Square ablaze with brand logos. (A muddled attempt to show flashes of the old, seedy Times Square succeeds in making the whole thing look even more inert and sad.) It’s a version of New York almost cynically targeted at potential tourists who might want some reassurance that the city is a slightly more exciting place to get some shopping done, but it’s not the one that they, or anybody else, need to see, especially not this summer. “I guess he’s going to Queens—he’s going to be the third scariest thing on that train,” Jones quips, after a ghost gets trapped in a subway car. I wish he had held the door for the rest of us.